


i've tried to wash you away (but you just won't leave)

by mildlyobsessive



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Angst, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Everything Hurts, Fluff and Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Character Death, Not Beta Read, Ouch, Some Plot, not much, off screen character death, this isn't good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2018-07-14 13:27:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7173725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mildlyobsessive/pseuds/mildlyobsessive
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's a mess, a bleary-eyed, exhausted mess.  The kind of mess where there's a hollow ache, a shotgun wound straight through his chest, and he's just expected to <em>deal</em> with it.</p>
<p>Expected to fucking <em>cope</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>Or an unnecessarily deep look into Phil Lester's swearing habits (or lack thereof)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i've tried to wash you away (but you just won't leave)

**Author's Note:**

> You know the drill:  
> I don't own Dan and Phil (I'm sure you're surprised)   
> This wasn't beta read as I don't have a beta (if you happen to be interested that'd be great)  
> It sucks  
> Oops  
> Title from Haunting by Halsey

Everything is a blur.

"Fuck you. Do you fucking hear me? Fucking fuck you!"

It's quiet. Of course it is. Phil yelling at him doesn't make him any less dead.

Jesus Christ, he's fucking _dead_.

The house is empty. It's a rare occasion. There are ~~10~~ 9 living in the on-campus home, where privacy is hoarded with the same zeal as first edition comic books or gold. The rest of them are probably out. 

Getting shitfaced.

Coping.

Call it what you like.

Phil is doing several things at the moment.

_Coping_ is sure as hell not one of them. 

He's a mess, a bleary-eyed, exhausted, mess. The kind of mess where there's a hollow ache, a shotgun wound straight through his chest, and he's just expected to _deal_ with it.

Expected to fucking _cope_.

"I fucking _hate_ you!" Phil screams. He's choking on nothing, on something, on everything. He's choking on boiling grief and smothering rage and everything in between.

"You don't get to fucking do this! It's our last fucking year at uni, you ass! You don't get to leave me here! You don't get to make me graduate without you!"

Phil wraps his arms around his waist, nails digging into his skin. "It's not fucking _fair,_ " he forces out between racking sobs. He is Pinocchio and grief is his puppet master, dangling him prostrate on a string of fingernails against irritated skin and half-blinded eyes. The night sky is his eager audience, baring starlit teeth and laughing silently at the boy screaming for someone who will never answer him.

"Fool," Phil can almost hear them sneer, even through the stifling vacuum of space. "Doesn't he realize that he isn't here? This is not heaven, and we are no angels. The boy would have better luck searching in a morgue."

"Shut the fuck _up_!" Phil shrieks, hands over his eyes as he desperately tries to block out voices that he's not even hearing. "Shut up shut up shut _up_!"

He crumples in on himself, implodes like something has detonated in his gut. "I fucking _miss_ you. What the hell am I supposed to do with you gone?"

A knock sounds on the door, brutal and much, much too loud, like bullets richocheting off of walls

Phil finds his way to it, somehow, and flings it open abruptly.

It's a neighbor of his, a girl with eyes that shine the color of freshly mowed grass and a sympathetic smile that could be likened to cherry-flavored lipgloss and strawberry picking. She is summer incarnate, and Phil can remember seeing her before and thinking that she was beautiful in a way that couldn't be replicated. But now, illuminated only in his shitty porchlight, she is dim and hollow and pointless, pointless, pointless.

"Hi," she murmers, clearly embarassed at her intrusion. "I, um, heard you . . . crying." She clears her throat, strawberry lips contorting. "Listen, I, uh, heard about your friend, and I just wanted to let you know that I'm really sorry for your loss. And I know that this is probably a really bad time to intrude, but i-if you ever need _anything_ , feel free to come to me. I'm right across the street."

He stares at her, bleary eyes seeing everything and nothing. "I-"

"It's just that I get what you're going through," she interrupts. "I know how you feel."

A switch flips somewhere deep down inside of Phil, somewhere that keeps red hot anger chained up like its prisoners. The warden sets them free. 

"You don't know a _fucking thing_ about how I fucking _feel_ ," he hisses, venom dripping from his tongue, the prisoners fleeing their penitentiary.

Her eyes widen. "Well-"

"Do you not fucking _get it?_ He's fucking _dead_. Six feet under, tombstone inscribed, room-cleaned-out, _dead_. What in the goddamn world could you possibly say to fix that? What bullshit excuse of fate or God's will or 'it was just his time', could you possibly use to make any of this stop hurting so _fucking_ much? Because I'm really fucking interested, so do say."

The prison is empty, cell doors swinging open. The guards make bewildered eye contact, wondering how this could happen.

And Summer follows their lead, as she turns on her heel and walks away.

. . .

The next few weeks are a grief-induced coma, a haze of painful memories, too-tight suits, and half-hearted condolences.

Phil's so fucking tired. 

He doesn't know how long he's been wearing the hoodie he's currently shrouded in, can't remember if it's been a day or a week or an eternity since the funeral. He can't recall when he last took a shower, or how long the same pair of contacts have been shriveling up in his eyes, drying more and more with every empty blink. 

E-mails from professors have started to flood his inbox, their patience at his absence starting to wear thin. He'll fail if he doesn't show up soon.

Phil can't make himself care.

His roomates are consistently blood-shot and reeking of alcohol, disappearing at night to come back dirty and hung over. But, hey, better hung over than hanging right?

Haha, isn't Phil just so _damn_ funny?

Don't call him insensitive. Don't try and lecture him. He's _coping_.

So what if his methods are a little odd? So what if he's traded in nights downing straight vodka for ones listening to the stars scoff? 

_Coping._

_Coping (verb): dealing effectively with something; derived from the Old French coper, colpner, from cop, colp, meaning 'a blow.' Via Latin from Greek kolaphos, translating to 'blow with a fist'_

The Greeks would know a thing or two, wouldn't they? What with all those Greek tragedies and whatnot.

Fan-fucking-tastic, isn't it? Phil's practically a character in ancient theatre! 

How fucking predictable. What a cliche of grief, what a John Green novel his life's become.

He can feel the stars guffawing. "We've seen this unfold more times than you could imagine, and you have the nerve to presume that you're something extraordinary? That you're worth a millisecond of our time? Please. You're a speck, a cell, a blink of an eye compared to us. We care as much about your pain as you do an ant under your foot."

He's losing it, he can tell. His eyes can't open all the way anymore and his hand shakes constantly and he can't hold a conversation with people anymore and he's fucking _losing it_.

Summer, or at least that's what he's taken to calling her in his ludicrous excuse for a brain, hasn't made a reappearence. Phil doesn't blame her. Doesn't care enough to. It doesn't matter.

What fucking _does_ , anyway?

. . .

It starts slowly at first. A tweet here, a comment there. Phil doesn't notice him much. He's found that piecing oneself back together with nothing but Scotch tape and willpower requires a large amount of energy.

But the username persists, making itself more and more blatantly, screamingly noticeable with every solitary stroke of the enter key.

Until, finally, Phil answers danisnotonfire on a night where everything is crumbling around him, pieces of himself mixing with debris he can't quite recognize, on a night where his fingers itch to do something much worse than tap out some responses to tweets. Until he uses him as a distraction.

Until he does much more than just that.

Tweets lead to texting which leads to four am Skype sessions which make Phil ache because Dan is young and beautiful and lives all the way across the fucking country, and he _needs_ him.

"Are you okay?" Dan asks him during one of their Skype calls, concern in pixelated brown eyes.

And Phil's not, he's really, truly not, because it's _his birthday_ and he's not here to see it because he's gone, dead, floated off to heaven or hell or nowhere at all. But what he says is "I'm fine."

Dan raises his eyebrows. "Your hands are shaking."

Phil fidgets with the sleeves of his jumper, his ripped fingernails rubbing against the fringing fabric. "Can . . . can you just talk? About something meaningless. Talk without saying anything at all. Just . . . please?"

Dan looks confused but obliges, his lilting voice filling the air with some story about vacations and sunstroke and nothing that involved dead best friends or slamming doors or malevolent galaxies. And Phil can breathe.

. . .

It isn't simple. It isn't quick. It's long and messy and throbs deep down inside of Phil's subconscious, because learning to live with this _fucking hole_ in his life is so much more difficult than he'd ever imagined.

It comes and goes like the tides, ebbing away at Phil until the moon grows tired of it. And then it floats away again, quiet but never gone, constantly bobbing on the horizon. Waves slap against shores, brutal claps of laughter marching along like clockwork. 

He breathes. 

He smiles.

He remembers.

He breaks.

" _Fuck this_! Fuck it fuck it fuck it fucking fuck it!"

"Phil, it's okay, I promise, just breathe."

"It's not, it never will be, I'll never be o-fucking-kay, Dan. Don't you get that? Doesn't _anyone_ fucking _get_ that?"

Dan has tears in his eyes. He blinks them away rapidly, before Phil notices. "It's your birthday, Phil. This is supposed to be a happy day."

The older one lets out a broken sob, hands pounding against the wall, fingers scrambling for something to keep him grounded while everything is washed away. "How can it be? I'm twenty-three and he's still twenty-one. And next year I'll be twenty-four and he'll be fucking twenty-one. I'll be eighty and he'll still be twenty-one, still be in some box six feet under, still won't have graduated uni. He'll fucking be there _forever_." He's hyperventilating, or panicking, or _something_ , because he can't focus and his lungs aren't cooperating, they're running raggedly like he's smoked three packs a day for the last ten years, but Phil doesn't fucking _smoke_.

Neither did he. A lot of good it did him.

And Dan is calling Phil's name, his voice smothered as if underwater, but everything is too fuzzy, too disjointed, too _much_.

Dan shakes him, doesn't know what else to do, and Phil plummets back from Neptune or Mount Everest or wherever the _fuck_ he was suffocating. And the stars are giggly, high on panic, giddy with how shattered Phil has made himself out to be.

"Hey! Phil, hey, it's okay, breathe. Breathe for me, okay? You're okay. It's all going to be okay. _Jesus_ , I know this hurts like hell, but you're going to do this, okay?" 

"I . . . I don't know what I'm supposed to do."

Dan looks at him for a split second, brown eyes damp and desperate and so, so sad. And then his lips crash down onto Phil's, warm and solid and needy, his hands tangling into Phil's hair. They're one and the same, entwined like fingers, reckless and pitiful and beautiful all at once.

And Phil pushes back into him, because this may not be an answer, or a path to follow, but, goddamn it, it's _something_.

. . .

And Phil looks at him like he is his savior, the one with all the answers, the boy to hold the jeering stars in the very palm of his hand. Perhaps that is a problematic thing to see in someone because Dan is just a boy with a shitty haircut, and it is a dangerous thing, to idealize someone. To see them as a force of nature rather than a human being, because people are weak and fragile and temporary, and seing them as anything other than that can only lead to perpetual disappointment.

But, when Phil looks at Dan, he can feel the bullet wound in his chest start to heal, and grief doesn't feel the need to manifest itself in primal and crude words sent sprinting off his tonque in a hundred meter dash.

It's _something_.

It's _coping_.


End file.
